For Durkheim

Essays in Historical and Cultural Sociology

Edward A. Tiryakian

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351936224
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

For Durkheim is a timely and original contribution to the debate about Durkheim at a time when his concerns on ethics, morality and civil religion have much relevance for our own troubled and divided society. It includes two new essays from Edward A. Tiryakian's collection on the Danish Muhammad cartoons and September 11th, providing contemporary relevance to the debate and an analytical and interpretive introduction indicating the ongoing importance of Durkheim within sociology. This indispensable volume for all serious Durkheim scholars includes English translations of papers previously published in French for the first time, and will be of interest to sociologists, anthropologists, social historians and those interested in critical questions of modernity.

PART 1
(Re) Discovering Durkheim

Chapter 1
Emile Durkheim’s Matrix¹

Introduction

Emile Durkheim is the crucial figure in the development of sociology as an academic discipline. Before Durkheim sociology was a provocative idea; by his professional endeavors it became an established social fact. Durkheim inherited a nineteenth-century sociological tradition, one with a distinctive French flavor of social realism and social reconstruction; much of contemporary sociology’s framework reflects basic features which were imparted by Durkheim’s refashioning of sociology into a systematic discipline. Two such features, “positivism” and “structural-functional analysis,” became in the 1960s and 1970s targets of much criticism (ideological as well as conceptual); nonetheless, one can also say that Durkheim’s visibility and esteem are presently at higher levels in both francophone and anglophone sociological circles than perhaps any previous period, including that of his own lifetime. Perhaps the quest for “roots of identity” is also operative in sociology as it has become in popular culture, and Durkheim is surely, alongside Max Weber and Karl Marx, one of the deepest roots of the sociological imagination. Whatever the reason, every self-respecting sociologist has read at least The Division of Labor and Suicide as an undergraduate or graduate student, and quite likely most sociologists will also have read during their career The Rules of the Sociological Method and The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. Each is a seminal study: the first in industrial sociology, the second in deviance, the third in methodology, and the fourth in the sociology of religion and of knowledge. Each is a venture in sociological analysis which does not fade with time, in a discipline where most works disappear from reading lists within ten years after publication. How many other sociologists have three or four of their works read firsthand by succeeding sociological generations? Moreover, Durkheim is not only still widely read but he is also more and more commented and reflected upon by new generations of sociologists, who are also producing new collections of his writings, some seeing print for the first time. Truly, it may be said that the past ten years have seen the production of the most extensive and high-caliber Durkheimiana of any comparable period since his death in 1917.

The understanding of such a major figure as Durkheim is, like any historical benchmark or event, not a once-and-for-all matter but rather more of an emergent process. Consequently, this essay will be selective in its emphasis, while trying to give the reader a general orientation to Durkheimian sociology. I have been fascinated by Durkheim for twenty years, but I do not feel there is anything definitive in my present understanding of his writings; still, some things, some connections seem clearer to me now than previously, and these I propose to share with readers of this volume. In particular, I wish to advance as a thesis that Durkheim’s sociological analysis, though it makes sense in itself, would better be understood as one component of a threefold life project.

Although the entelechy for this vast project cannot be documented in the form of a letter or journal entry kept by Durkheim, nonetheless there are sufficient indications to propose that his life project was constituted by three interwoven goals:

1. to establish sociology as a rigorous scientific discipline
2. to provide the basis for the unity and unification of the social sciences
3. to provide the empirical, rational, and systematic basis for modern society’s civil religion.

Durkheim was successful in achieving the first. By the age of forty Durkheim had produced sociology’s “manifesto” in the guise of the trilogy consisting of The Division of Labor, The Rules of Sociological Method, and Suicide. Equally significant, he celebrated his fortieth birthday with the publication of the first volume of the Année Sociologique, a collective enterprise of the first real sociological school, whose formation was entirely due to Durkheim’s intellectual charisma. When Durkheim began his teaching career in the 1880s, sociology was highly suspect in academic circles, in the Old as well as in the New World, for it ran counter to the dominant individualism of the nineteenth century. But Durkheim, in the pre-First World War French university setting which prided itself in intellectual elitism, became one of the most respected and influential members of the faculty of the prestigious Sorbonne. Symbolic of his conquest of the academic setting on behalf of the discipline which reflected so much his imprint, he was eventually given the first chair of sociology in France in 1913.

The second component of the project entailed establishing the unity of the social (or cultural) sciences on a positivistic basis. Here Durkheim was heir to the Comtean idea of the essential unity of scientific knowledge, with sociology as the last emergent science, furnishing the pinnacle of man’s cognitive mastery of the world. The social world was understood by Durkheim as a moral ensemble, with its structure and organization subject to rational understanding. Durkheim saw that such an understanding was necessarily a collaborative undertaking, for science progresses only through a division of labor; the latter became for Durkheim both a moral principle and a scientific principle of essential importance for the modern world. The Division of Labor and the Année Sociologique are complementary in providing the theory and practice of what Durkheim thought of this fundamental principle of organization. 1. 2. 3.

Social science deals with conventions, mores, ideals; in brief, Durkheim viewed it as investigating scientifically the normative infrastructure of human society. Economics, history, law, and religion are some of the familiar chambers of the human house, and sociology provides the thread which interrelates all the chambers. From Claude Bernard, the founder of modern physiology, Durkheim was well aware that the hallmark of science is experimentation and comparative analysis; however, direct experimentation (such as Bernard had done for experimental medicine with vivisection) is not possible in the social world.

Nevertheless, the comparative analysis of social phenomena in a systematic, organized way was a project which Durkheim partially realized with the Année Sociologique. As Terry Clark has aptly commented,² this was in its operation a sociological laboratory as much as a journal, one in which recruits served an apprenticeship learning the craft of the new science; the paramount endeavor of this journal was to codify the forms and contents of sociology. Durkheim’s academic collaborators in this project were not for the most part professional sociologists, yet they formed a highly integrated interdisciplinary team, sharing various academic and social bonds, and they translated to their own specialty areas the core sociological view obtained from Durkheim.³ The Année Sociologique (still published today) reflected under Durkheim’s editorship his acceptance of the essential unity of all social phenomena and his belief that their structural characteristics may be studied scientifically, objectively. But the journal was only a partial success in terms of unifying the social sciences, for the First World War terminated the life of its organizing spirit and decimated the ranks of the second generation of the project. Durkheim’s successor and nephew, Marcel Mauss (1872-1950), was acknowledged as a great erudite – “he knew everything,” has been said of Mauss – but there was one thing which this genial man of genius did not possess, and that was the discipline and rigor of organization. Mauss himself did not complete his dissertation, and was unable to carry on successfully the editorship of the Année, which suspended publication after two issues.⁴ Lacking a forum for its development and lacking effective instrumental leadership, Durkheim’s project of the unity of the social sciences became stalemated in the interwar period.⁵

The third component of Durkheim’s life project immerses us in the sociohistorical situation of the Third Republic and takes us into the sector of ideology and partisanship. This French regime, threatened with abortion at its start in the 1870s, was marked with political instability, like its two republican predecessors.⁶ Modern France, from 1789 until today, seems to oscillate between the poles of republicanism and caesarism, punctuated with relatively brief but intense civil or near-civil wars. The French sociological tradition begun by Saint-Simon, followed by Comte, Le Play, and Durkheim, has a common denominator in its repugnance of political upheavals, of group struggles for power, of chicanery and civil strife. The tradition, in contradistinction to Marxist sociology, is to make sociology a healing and stabilizing science, one that will find a viable basis for restoring social consensus and for enhancing societal integration, with a particular concern for the integration of the working class in the social body.⁷ This tradition seems, ultimately, to underscore the importance of morality as the cornerstone of social peace and justice. Thus, Saint-Simon, that fabulous visionary of modern society, saw at the end of a meteoric life that the industrial structure was incomplete without a normative component, and he wrote The New Christianity to establish the morality appropriate for the new dawning social order. The assessment that the social order needs an integrating morality to complement economic life is a key aspect of nineteenth century French social thought, particularly of the liberal left.⁸

Since morality figures prominently in Durkheim’s writings, his sociological orientation has been characterized in some quarters as conservative.⁹ Yet Durkheim was a trusted civil servant of the republican regime, which gave him the appropriate accolade of Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur in 1907; he never frequented conservative circles and instead belonged to liberal voluntary associations (such as the Ligue des Droits de l’Homme). Moreover, it may be said that his most challenging assignment was to develop a scientifically grounded morality which would supersede once and for all the traditional Christian morality and the authority of the Catholic Church which constituted a basic rallying point for every right-wing political movement that contested the legitimacy of the Third Republic. Consequently, the culmination of Durkheim’s life project would entail providing France, as prototypical of modern society, with a civil religion which would be in accordance with the nature of things.

In this respect, Durkheim was the heir to a twofold patrimony. First, in carrying out this project he would assist in completing the Principles of 1789, which are those of modern liberal democracy. Durkheim viewed the French Revolution not as a calamity (the conservative outlook on this event), nor as a sham illusion (the radical outlook), but rather as a great promise lacking completion. The Revolution had installed a secularized religion complete with a cult,¹⁰ but this had not taken root, essentially because of its imposition on society from above rather than its correspondence to felt collective religious needs. In an extensive review early in his career, Durkheim expressed the importance of sociology’s concern for the Principles of 1789:

What are the destinies of the revolutionary religion? What will it become?… There is indeed no question which should attract more the attention of legislators and statesmen: do not all the difficulties in which nations find themselves at the present time stem from the difficulty in adapting the traditional structure of societies to these new and unconscious aspirations which have been tormenting societies for a century?¹¹

Second, Durkheim was in this respect also heir to Comte’s positivistic legacy. Comtean positivism was more than a cognitive mapping of the world via the “positive” sciences. It was also intended as the formulation of a new world order, a rational, scientifically based “religion of mankind,” complete with a calendar and the cult of the Great Being, which is mankind or human society writ large. The French Revolution and Comte, thus, were inspirational sources in the background of Durkheim’s project to give sociology an ultimate pragmatic justification: sociology would uncover the appropriate integrative force for a secularized but moral social order. Consequently, the quest for a civil religion has to be kept in mind as one major factor if we are to make sense as to why Durkheim and so many of his ablest lieutenants devoted so much time and effo...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Rethinking Classical Sociology
• List of Tables
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Dedication
• Permissions
• PART 1 (Re) Discovering Durkheim
• PART 2 Durkheim and Cultural Change
• PART 3 Durkheim and Weber
• Other Writings by Edward A. Tiryakian Relating to Durkheim
• Index